Republicans struggle to respond to Hunter Biden’s conviction

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The judge in the case has not yet sent a sentencing date.

Hunter Biden faces up to 25 years in prison. The legal experts are saying that a first-time offender of a non-violent crime isn't likely to get that maximum penalty.

His father, the president, was firm in his response. He supports his son, but he believes in the rule of law.

As I said last week, I'm the president, but I'm also a dad. Jill, and I love our son and we are so proud of the man. He is today. He said that we will respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.

After Donald Trump was convicted in a New York court last month, right-wing pundits and Republican politicians were lining up to accuse the Biden White House of rigging the justice system for their own political advantage. Yet now the courts have convicted Biden's own son. So how do the right explain that? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist for The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

Welcome to 2024, an election year like no other, I guess. Certainly, I can't think of any historical parallels here.

Susan Glasser is an author and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. I asked her to start us off by explaining what exactly Hunter Biden had been convicted of.

Well, it's an obscure offence. It's not necessarily the kind of thing that would make its way to a federal criminal case all the time, but essentially for lying on federal forms to purchase a handgun. And you are not allowed to be an addict when you do that. And this was at a time when Hunter Biden in his life was spiraling out of control, and that included an addiction to crack cocaine. And so he was convicted on the three federal criminal counts he was charged with.

That's right, because stating untruthfully that he was not addicted to or using drugs, that's one of the questions you're asked before buying a weapon. And then, on the same form, as it were, stating that statement was true. And then there was this third charge about owning the gun illegally for 11 days. And then this just gets all a bit kind of Jerry Springer, but also that it was his sister-in-law who became his lover, Hallie Biden, who eventually threw the gun into a rubbish bin, a garbage bin. I mean, that was a whole other subplot, because she was the widow of his brother and then became his partner for a while.

Highlighting a text where Hunter asked her to meet him with the truck at 2 a.

I just miss you and want to hang out with you. For the Biden family, how painful do you think it was for them just to hear this testimony?

Oh, absolutely. This is, you know, an example of a family tragedy that has now become the fodder of politics, of tabloids. And, you know, it's the kind of thing that no one would wish to become front page news. It's sordid, as you put it, Jerry Springer-like. This was all in the period, by the way, after the tragic death of Joe Biden's other son, after Biden left the vice presidency, and in the period before and leading up to when he decided to run for president again against Donald Trump.

Yeah, I mean, that point about the admissions that Hunter Biden himself made, people were playing, I think, in the court extracts from his audiobook where he talked about, you know, being an occasional crack user, then to every other day, then to every day, and then almost every hour. And this is not the sort of things that, you know, the first family would normally be associated with. To put to you a question that we're now getting used to asking, which is, we don't yet have a sentencing date. But what is the term the man we're talking about could face? We were asking this question a couple of weeks back about Donald Trump, and it's still hanging over him.

Right, well, of course, there's a certain amount of discretion left up to the judge. It could be anything up to several years. Biden, in this case, is a first-time offender. The gun was not used in any crime, violent or otherwise. So I think there's a lot of people who think it's more likely to be in the months range than in the years range that he would face this.

I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? This very human tragedy drawing in a man who, as is known by the American public, has had more than his fair share of family heartache and grief. And we heard that, you know, it's part of the case that his descent, Hunter Biden's intercrack addiction, was partly because he was struggling to cope with the fallout of the death of his brother, Beau Biden, Joe Biden's son, who died from brain cancer in 2015,. and, of course, the big tragedy was very early on, in which that car accident, which killed Joe Biden's first wife and a daughter. I mean, it has just been a tale of woes, and that was always seen as being something that made Joe Biden very sort of relatable, where he had this great human empathy, and it was at one point seen as being a very crucial part of his appeal.

Well, that's right. So there's the personal tragedy here. And Biden released that statement. But then he did also take a helicopter to Delaware, and we have the photographs of him embracing his son on the tarmac. His wife, First Lady Jill Biden, accompanied Hunter Biden to the trial, was there for the verdict, holding his hand as they walked out of court.

Our whole country is being rigged right now. This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt an opponent, a political opponent. And I think it's just a disgrace. And we'll keep fighting.

We'll fight till the end and we'll win, because our country's gone to hell. Trump and his supporters didn't just attack that verdict, as you recall, but attacked the very basis and legitimacy of the court, the judge, the jurors, everything. Said that it was somehow Joe Biden himself who had intervened in this state legal proceeding, somehow to bring these charges against him, the Justice Department somehow implicated, all part of a general weaponization of the machinery of government against Donald Trump, all made up, we should say. But the counterpoint, with Biden in this very measured, very reserved tone, essentially saying we're going to support the legitimacy of our institutions, that is the contrast that Americans will be asked to vote on, I think, this November.

So, as you said, the argument from the Republicans throughout after Trump's conviction and throughout all these legal woes of his, has been that the justice system is rigged and that Joe Biden is pursuing a political vendetta, weaponizing the Department of Justice, using as a tool to do his political bidding. Doesn't the conviction of Hunter Biden drive a coach and horses through that argument?

Well, I mean, in sort of reality world, yes, I guess not in alternate MAGA conspiracy world. And I was really struck by that, Jonathan, just literally minutes after the announcement of the jury's guilty verdict in the Hunter Biden case, I was watching, just almost with my jaw dropping. as key advisors to Donald Trump, people like Stephen Miller, you remember him, immediately inventing a whole new conspiracy theory in order to somehow make the incompatible facts fit their narrative. And the instant conspiracy theory that they came up with was don't pay attention to this guilty verdict. It is a, quote, distraction.

And when he comes out, he'll be rewarded for his loyalty, like a made man in a Biden crime family.

This is a distraction from the influence, peddling and the kickbacks.

So don't pay attention to the fact that he has been proven to be guilty here, because that's actually not proof that the system is working. It's contorted. It's hard even to follow this logic, except that you realize how deep in it these folks are and that there has to be an instant conspiracy theory invented around anything where the don't fit their pre-existing narrative of grievance and victimization.

Yeah, the gun charges are a giant misdirection, tweeted Stephen Miller. An easy op, meaning operation for DOJ, Department of Justice, to sell to a pliant media that is all too willing to be duped. Don't be gaslit. This is all about protecting Joe Biden, and only Joe Biden. So in other words, Biden is sitting there as sort of the Don Corleone figure, pulling all the strings, saying we'll deliberately pretend that we've got.

You know, it's a, it's a great question. I suppose I'm not the target audience for that conspiracy theory and therefore not best suited to speak to, you know, how it runs over with those who are the target audience. But but again, like it's just also the cruelty, right? Whatever you think of Joe Biden, he probably has the view that, rather than a conspiracy theory to cover up his son's crimes, I'm sure that he and his family believe that Hunter Biden never would have faced this court case if it were not for the fact that they wanted to go after Hunter in order to go after his father. And, you know, that Biden must feel very guilty on some level, that, you know, that this is even occurring in this private tragedy of his son.

I mean, is this line that from Stephen Miller and others saying, oh, you know, you don't be gaslit, don't be misdirected, you're not looking at the real thing. Let's just go through what it is that those people who say that are talking about the other crimes they think Biden or Hunter, Biden or Hunter and Joe together are guilty of in the sort of, again, the MAGA world. What do they think? this is a big distraction from?

Great question. You know, actually, in a way, this this case has done them a favor of distracting people from the complete failure of their effort. After years and years of investigations, they've sort of come up dry in their effort to create a bigger, broader narrative about what Trump calls the quote Biden crime family. You know, the real story has been that since Republicans took over the House of Representatives, they launched a major effort to impeach Joe Biden on the basis of allegedly crooked business deals involving Hunter.

This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public.

They could not find the evidence and they spent months and months and millions of dollars trying to do it. And actually, that case kind of collapsed spectacularly earlier this year when the main witness turned out to be a former FBI informant who had lied about everything. And so, you know, but basically what they've sought to do is to is to show over the years that Hunter Biden engaged in various acts of more or less influence peddling, you know, selling access and influence to, or at least the appearance of it, based on his father's last name and his former position as vice president. That's what Trump's first impeachment was all about. Back in 2019, Donald Trump looked at Joe Biden, saw Biden as his strongest potential competitor, and he wanted Zelensky, the new president of Ukraine, to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine, where he sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and desperately seeking to tie that in some way to Joe Biden.

Yeah, because even if you could construct a theory that Hunter Biden did trade on his dad's name a bit, there's been no evidence that anyone's ever been able to offer that suggests Joe Biden himself profited from that. And that's what they would need in order to have some kind of, you know, chargeable or even impeachable offense. The thing that struck me about this, even when it was ongoing, was that this was surely uncomfortable, this case for the right, because they're exactly the people who want people to be able to buy guns quite easily. They're not exactly sticklers when it comes to background checks and so on. So for them to get very agitated about a man being able to walk in and buy a gun, even though, you know, it's Biden's son, this is not their sort of easy terrain, is it?

Well, that's an excellent point, Jonathan. In fact, actually, some of the Trump supporters dissented from the Stephen Miller conspiracy theory and offered their own view of the case, which is in line with what you're saying. People like Matt Gaetz, the outspoken Florida congressman who's the big Trump cheerleader, he said, yeah, I don't like this case. It's overblown. And you saw a number of people who are big pro-gun types in the Republican right being very critical of the case for exactly the reason that you're pointing out.

Yeah, that's one of those moments when you feel the divine scriptwriter is getting a little on the nose.

Yeah, or that he can't catch a break.

Yeah, it's just one thing after another. I mean, on those lines, actually, you know, between us, we would have been covering elections for quite a few decades. And I'm just wondering if there has ever been a period, an election period, certainly where the law and the courts and charges and convictions have played such a part in the politics. I mean, maybe you have to go back to the Nixon era, although even then all the big court cases tumbled out after the 1972 election. But here we've got Trump.

Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison in 2022.

It was because he had refused to testify before the Congressional Committee investigating the January the 6th attempted insurrection or riot, depending on your point of view. And we have the New Jersey senator, Democrat Bob Menendez, on trial over charges of bribery, suggesting that he accepted gifts of gold bars and a Mercedes in exchange for helping foreign governments. I mean, you know, this political cycle feels like it's running through the courthouse.

Well, that's right. Look, you know, there are two very different things going on here. You know, in American politics, as in British politics, there is unfortunately a long tradition of corruption by elected officials. There have been many sensational trials over the years. Bob Menendez, not the first New Jersey senator, I'm afraid to say, who has been tried for corruption.

Yeah, I sometimes think that Richard Nixon must be looking down from heaven or looking up from hell, depending where he is.

I don't think he's in heaven, but.

No, I would agree with you. I don't think he's in heaven. So let's imagine where he might be. But watching this, thinking, why was I such a sucker? I should have just brazened it out.

Yeah, I mean, I think that is the goal. You very crisply stated what Trump and his supporters have been trying to do for years now, the kind of everybody does it, they're all crooked. There's very little evidence to suggest that voters have held the Hunter Biden story against Joe Biden. Joe Biden has plenty of challenges in this 2024 election. But I think this has remained largely in the category of personal tragedy, certainly family tragedy, and also perhaps a distraction, which I wouldn't discount.

Yeah, I think it's just a difference in sheer scale, if nothing else. Susan, you know that on the podcast, because you've been with us before, that we do like to ask our guests a what else question about something different. There have been elections in the United States this week. They roll on all the time. Primary elections, special elections.

Well, I guess if you're really in search of cheer, you could take some from it. But look, you know, I started out as a reporter on Capitol Hill, writing and covering congressional elections, Senate elections. And I will tell you, it's generally speaking a mistake to read too much into special elections, low turnout affairs, not a lot of, you know, other big, important things on the ballot to bring people out. I mean, I do also note that Ohio, while having turned very Republican in recent years, also came out very strongly to stop proposed very restrictive anti-abortion measures on the ballot. So it showed, you know, that there's more of a center in Ohio and across our country than it may seem from the overall very extreme tone of our politics these days.

That is sage guidance, as always, from you, Susan Glasser. Thanks so much for joining me on Politics Weekly America.

What a treat. Thank you so much.

And that is all from me for this week. Before I go, as well as our sister podcast today and Focus's extra daily election campaign updates, do make sure to listen to this week's fantastic episode of Politics Weekly Westminster, where The Guardian's Pippa Crera and Kieran Stacey analyze how Wednesday night's back-to-back interviews conducted by Beth Rigby went for both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak. And a housekeeping tip from us. Google Podcasts is closing next week, on June the 23rd. So any of you who listen to us there will now have to find us on another platform.

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